Cops are sniffing around for a young woman caught on video with a beloved pooch she had just brazenly stolen from a Manhattan man when he briefly ducked into a Starbucks.

“I consider him like a son,” said anguished East Side real-estate investor David Maidman of “Teddy,” his missing 8-year-old miniature Labradoodle.

“I’m 76. I’ve had dogs all my life — this one is the best,” Maidman said. “I spend more time with him than any human being, actually.”

Maidman, a championship bridge player, had taken Teddy for his nightly walk Sept. 11 after his wife, Nancy, asked him to get her a cappuccino.

Man and dog went to the Starbucks on Second Avenue and East 50th Street as they have “hundreds” of times before, Maidman said. He tied Teddy’s leash to a phone booth and went into the coffee shop, which does not allow animals.

When he came out minutes later, Teddy was gone.

Maidman’s wife, Nancy, said her husband was in “shock.”

“We were both just besides ourselves,” she said. “I didn’t close my eyes that night.”

The couple quickly sprang into action, blanketing the neighborhood — where Teddy is widely known as a friendly pooch — with 200 fliers and posting a reward offer on Craiglist seeking his return. They also alerted cops.

A week later, a woman called Nancy and told her “she had seen the flier and she was sure she had seen [Teddy] in the Food Emporium the night that he went missing,” Nancy recalled. The grocery story is just a block away from the Starbucks.

The caller since has spoken to police detectives and told them she saw a woman “come into the store very distraught and said something [like] her boyfriend had moved out, and she had to buy dog food,” Nancy said. “When [employees] asked her what kind of dog it was, she said she didn’t know.”

Police — who had first told the couple they didn’t investigate missing-pet cases — got involved this week after a well-connected friend of the Maidmans reached out to the NYPD, Nancy Maidman said.

Cops yesterday released surveillance video from Food Emporium that clearly shows Teddy and the suspected thief.